Alexandra Samuel's blog | Social Signal

The incredible reaction to Open SoSi got me thinking about my proposed panel for SXSW, Are you smarter than a social media expert? As originally conceived, this panel asked:

Is there such a thing as a social media expert? What do they bring to the table? The experts will defend their titles (or admit their limitations) against challengers from the audience and the online world.

We were delighted to see that Tamsyn Burgmann's article on social media career opportunities -- featuring Alex, Channing and TheBigWild.org's Theo Lamb --  ran in the Toronto Star yesterday. And we were even more delighted to get this lovely message from a Toronto Star reader Rhea Claus:

Day one of Open SoSi, and it's already in the news as a potential resource for professionals starting out in social media.

Today's Canadian Press article by Tamsyn Burgmann, Companies seek social media experts to keep online conversation rolling, includes the following reference to our newly open-sourced materials:

Read part 1, introducing the Concept Jam overview >>

Today, we're releasing two documents that can help you structure a Concept Jam workshop.

The Concept Jam workshop agenda (doc) is the document we share with all the participants in a workshop. We create a custom agenda for each workshop, depending on client, participants and the time available (while we prefer a full day, we've done half-day versions by developing the list of audiences, goals and strengths ahead of time, in consultation with our client). In some instances a client wants to include stakeholders or audience members in the brainstorming portions of the workshop, so we'll invite them to join the workshop at lunchtime, and use the morning to set up the audiences, goals and strengths lists as a strictly internal team conversation.

We're launching Open SoSi by sharing the Concept Jam. The Concept Jam is a workshop-based methodology for identifying an organization’s most promising social media opportunities.  It's the part of our work that we love the most, and that we think gives the greatest value to our clients. It's also the one part of our current service line-up that we hope to do even more of in the months and years to come. So we figured we'd put our money where our mouth is by giving that away first.

This is a postscript to my series on why & how to Mac-ify a PC netbook.

Continued from Part 5: How to decide if you should install the Mac OS on a PC netbook

You'll know you're ready to Mac-ify your netbook once you:

Now that you've read about how I mac-ified my HP Mini netbook, and how much I love the results, you may be wondering whether a mac-ified netbook is for you. Here's my quick rundown of who should (or shouldn't) try this at home.

Don't consider Macifying a netbook if...

Continued from Part 3: How to migrate your current Mac setup to your new Mac netbook

Two weeks into my new Mac-ified netbook, I'm no longer longing for that MacBook Air. While I still find it occasionally inconvenient to work on a teensy weensy screen, the lightness and small form factor of the netbook are actually preferable to the larger (and slightly heavier) Macbook Air. Now that I've got the Mac OS to work with, I realize that my frustrations with the netbook were 90% software, 10% hardware (and the hardware issues are largely addressed by the fantastic Microsoft Arc mouse -- a must, given the poorly-located trackpad buttons on the Mini).